Fire Splinter is having a blast - snipers with bazookas?

Dear splinterlands fans, in this weekly battle article I want to show very powerful combination of abilities – Blast with Snipe.

Blast on its own is powerful ability that significantly increases damage monster can inflict, but when we add snipe ability damage quickly start to get into insane numbers because of two reasons – we are hitting something behind tank, which is less likely to have shield or void to reduce incoming damage and blast ability hits 2 neighboring monsters instead of just 1.

Let’s start with table showing how much damage monster can do:

Base Damage	1	2	3	4	5
Just Blast	2 (+100%)	3 (+50%)	5 (+67%)	6 (+50%)	8 (+60%)
Blast and Snipe	3 (+200%)	4 (+100%)	7 (+133%)	8 (+100%)	11 (+120%)

As we can see using monster with odd attack gives better damage increase, most significant at 1 attack, but that have problems with shield/void, so it is best to aim for 3 or 5 attack.
Those damage increases are huge – more than doubling damage is no joke.

Let’s get into match analysis, it is ranked from gold/diamond border:

On first glance ruleset looks benign enough, but ignoring rule that all monsters have snipe ability can bring quick demise, especially in mid-mana matches. There are two correct ways to approach this – you either build composition that takes advantage from snipe abilities or you build composition that does not have any snipe target using reach, opportunity and such monsters. Opponent did neither of those viable strategies and ignored this rule and that was enough to make battle of similar level deck completely one sided. My strategy in match is snipe composition designed to fight other snipe compositions and still do ok vs variety of possible no-snipe-target compositions.

Pyre is king here. In glass cannon battles speed is the most important attribute. It is difference between slaughtering your opponent and dying before having chance to attack at all. With higher and higher leagues speed is more and more important and snipe blast composition takes this to extreme.

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Chicken in front to soak one hit from opponent’s tank + make our main tank also snipe-tank, common battle tested strategy that works well and have little to no downsides.

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This is bit unorthodox, but works as ideal cheap “padding” for main tank, letting him to absorb as many snipe shots as possible. It’s important that this monster have melee attack, so snipe attacks will not target him and sneak ability is added bonus – maybe he will do a bit of damage too.

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Main tank + snipe tank in one. This is one of the situations where I prefer Cube over Lord A. and there are 3 reasons for it – Cube is sufficiently tucked back so it will grow a bit before receiving full brunt of attacks and I expect cube to receive some damage in meantime, so heal ability will get a lot of value. Last, but not least Cube is bit of counter to Lord A. because if those are only remaining monsters (plus possibly few more unable to break through Cube’s heal) Cube will triumph in fatigue phase so it is possible win condition for cases like vs sneak no-snipe-target compositions.

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Here’s our first damage dealer, Pyromancer is kinda slow, but durable enough to survive few blast hits from opponent’s monsters targeting our cube, and being secondary tank is quite rare feature of monsters capable of dealing 7 damage a turn. Very solid monster overall for snipe wars.

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Our main damage dealer, glass cannon, but fast and deadly. That’s another 7 potential damage delivered quickly, this time only for 5 mana – Isn’t it insane? Like all glass cannons Fire Elemental needs to be protected so 5^th position - the safest spot in this battle.

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Support damage dealer. Lacks blast so damage potential is nowhere near previous two monsters, but Pixies are our fastest monsters so they will be useful for clearing decoys or breaking armors greatly increasing chance that our main damage dealers will hit vital targets without armor. Also Spark Pixies combined with buff from Pyre makes decent dodge tank versus possible sneak attacks.

here is link to battle

Wow what a massacre! Ending with more health than what I had questions the definition of flawless victory. Even Chicken survived! As mentioned before opponent ignored ruleset and made normal composition for normal matches. But you can’t ignore snipes.

I do use blast monster quite often – usual suspects like Fire Elemental or Pirate Archer are evergreens and once I get Yodin Zaku I think I will be using non-blast monsters with blast even more.

Thank you for reading and good luck in the @splinterlands.

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